Intricate
by Jen ConsultingWriters
Summary: Sherlock's mind is a battlezone. Logic against emotion, thoughts against feelings. John is not helping. A look at Sherlock's unique mind, and how it affects his life with a certain John Watson. Reference to adult themes.


**My first Sherlock story, and opening gambit on ! I hope you enjoy it, comments and criticism are always greatly appreciated.**

**A number of adult themes are referenced, non-explicit.**

Sherlock closed his eyes, and let himself surrender. He was swept into oblivion, a space where his mind worked in a different way, where he could think properly. His mind was usually so gloriously complex; in this moment, it stilled to the key thoughts and concepts, analysis calmed, the conclusions reasoned and logical.

Sherlock was usually considering several dozen things at once; most basically, his mind was always focusing on everything around him, the observations filling his usual analytical channels, preventing him from analysing anything that was not an immediate concern.

Playing the violin brought him into a disconnected state, the music dancing him into a place where the usual background melee was audible. Bigger issues that usually didn't command his attention came into focus in this space.

People, emotions, analysis of his own actions – he was a being of logical intention, not necessarily logical action. He was not emotionless, a long way from it, but he was able to control his emotions to a degree. When they spilled over, he stored the memories, waited for the right time, and analysed why it had occurred to avoid it happening again.

He was patently aware of his own strangeness. Sociopathic was not a true term to cover it, psychopathic was mildly insulting, autistic not even vaguely accurate. He was a constellation of disorders, drawing his own being from aspects of a million 'disorders' that sharpened in his own mind to one, complete being.

Sherlock liked to say he was complete. It never was, could be or would be entirely true. He played his cards so tightly to his chest, revealed nothing, revelled in the creation of this dispassionate and disconnected being, mind entirely engaged in his work, finding a person he could become. He told everybody that he didn't care what people thought, his arrogance apparent, his emotions stifled after years of careful practise into something unrecognisable.

They waited for him though. Every part of every emotion conceivable lived in him, shown only in flashes, in provocation, triggered to pour out of him when he least expected and least desired them.

Manic spells crept up, unbidden, sending him through rare laughter and hyperkinetic frenzies, unstoppable. It was beautiful, perfect, a flight of the imagination and of being – but not the person he had constructed. He quelled the mania through cigarettes an contempt for any food, and waited out the time until his mind recollected itself and calmed.

Depressive states were just as common, leaving Sherlock catatonic, silently crying over everything and nothing. He hated those moments. Cocaine dragged him up, up and away, out of the black abyss that held nothing but some nameless, omnipresent form of desolation. It wasn't even pain, that darkness. It was merely an endless chasm of absolutely nothing. Cocaine shot through his vein, electric and alive, and reminded him that he wasn't dead. Not yet.

There was no cycle, no rhyme or reason. A million psychiatrists could have placed a million labels, but ultimately, it didn't matter. It was how his mind was constructed, and by now, he knew how to live with it.

It was not ideal. Artificial substances helped. Yet they didn't make everything better, and they didn't make everything go away. It brought him to some strange middle ground while he rode out the storm without destroying his constructed world, his constructed being. The emotionless analyst, detached from human minutiae, able to rationalise.

Emotions couldn't be rationalised, least of all his own, but they could be dealt with. He felt the inexorable pull of bleak depression, and prepared himself for it. He felt his mind and body start to soar, and found ways of grounding himself.

In anger, in despair, his body rejects him, fights back. He battles constantly against himself, wondering all the time whose side he's on, and if it even matters. He wonders what will happen if he stops fighting, and realises – his emotions will begin to run him. He will be a being of emotion and thought, rationality clouded by sentiment, analysis obscured by distractions of damned emotions.

He will be, in short, like everybody else. It is not a thought he can bear.

His intelligence means that he is aware, and unaware. He has read most psychological journals of any repute, understands more than many qualified professionals. He knows the 'cures', how one should solve his problems. He is patently aware that painstakingly going through his past for answers will achieve nothing, and nor will minute doses of meaningless prescribed drugs. He prefers self-medication. Simpler, more predictable.

It also deals with the one thing nobody seems to understand – the emptiness. He is an analyst, and when called upon, oh, he is brilliant. His mind dances, glides, swoops, curves into new thoughts, different thoughts, and he feels alive in a way that drugs cannot replicate.

The moment he is no longer required, when the puzzle is solved, when his mental facilities are no longer taxed – a state he seems to live most of his life in – he has nothing. A vast emptiness, numb, totally bored out of his skull in a surprisingly literal sense. He can barely exist. Anything at all is a distraction.

He depresses the plunger, and ice fire shoots through him, and the noise stops. He can breathe. He can think.

He vomits violently, the room swaying as he tries to support himself, the reasons behind his self-inflicted torture long since lost to some adolescent trigger. Another addictive behaviour. Utterly textbook. Sherlock is actually quite disappointed at being a textbook case, if he is brutally honest. He likes being unique. He likes being different.

He doesn't analyse why. Thoughts like those are compartmentalised, boxed away in some foreign corner of his meticulously organised mind, waiting to spill over when the next manic or depressive phase hits. Until that time, they are safely stowed away. He can live.

He plays the violin. It helps him to think. Right now, he is trying to consider something that has never truly come up before, not in any real capacity. Not since he was far younger, and far more emotionally volatile, if that could be believed.

Stowing his emotions out of reach was excellent in theory. In practise, it gave him a complete lack of empathy. He could read behaviours, but found it difficult to infer motives; in crimes, most motives were logical. In human beings around him, companions, flat-mates, for example… well. Living in close proximity to another human being meant being subjected to a full spectrum of behaviours and emotional outpourings. Sherlock was forced to concede he no longer understand what half of them meant.

He understood the theory, of course. He had studied human behaviour long enough to know. John was attracted to him; it was easily discerned from his body language, demeanour, language, tone. Motions, behaviours, actions that were relatively obvious if you knew what you were searching for.

John would never make a move unless he believed Sherlock was comfortable. He would never presume, and would probably pass most of his life without ever admitting to Sherlock how he felt. Sherlock knew that perfectly well.

He couldn't help but wonder, however. His own emotions towards John were difficult to define or explain; he had nothing to draw conclusions from, minimal experience with human connections after a lifetime without friends or lovers. He was working in a void, his knowledge of care and attention, even love, drawn entirely from literary references that he had come across in passing.

He read swathes of eloquent prose, discussing what love felt like. He compared that to his own emotions, and was uncertain of the conclusion that he could draw. He wondered if he was mistaking love for friendship; close friendships seemed to bear similar symptoms to love, muddying the waters, making it impossible to work out.

In any case, sex was another complicating factor. Sherlock felt only minimal draw towards others in a sexual way, and it wasn't restricted to one gender; he found that while he could appreciate the aesthetic beauty of a human being, he felt no actual attraction to them based on superficiality. 'Love at first sight' seemed an entirely alien concept.

He called himself asexual, and never really minded what that meant. He hoped it meant he was excluded from the realms of emotional attachment, was a unique individual, able to function without the ties that most people had.

Yet with John, he felt something. He didn't know what it was. He didn't understand it, and that terrified him more than he would ever deign to admit. It was emotion that he had no control over, was not triggered or implanted, just existed, irritating him by its mere presence.

"Sherlock, are you aware of the time?" asked a weary voice from behind him, sounding surprisingly calm. John was usually far angrier with Sherlock's penchant for early morning violin concertos.

Sherlock ignored him; it bordered on criminal in his mind to interrupt a piece, let alone a phrase, of music. John stood watching as his fingers danced their way to a conclusion, allowing a moment of silence to fall before he gently extracted the violin from beneath his chin, turning to face John.

The emotion was present. It tended to become more acute in John's vicinity, and yet, Sherlock still sought out John's company above and beyond all others. Usually, when faced with an emotional response he could not control, Sherlock fled. John was an exception, and Sherlock was ill-equipped to understand why.

"What're you thinking about?" John asked quietly, loose cotton pyjamas creased, hair mussed, as he sat himself down on his usual armchair, facing Sherlock. "It's two in the morning, and we haven't got a case. So what's on your mind?"

Sherlock appreciated that, if he was completely honest. Nobody had ever known him long enough, or well enough, to ask such questions. His mouth crooked into a smile, turning his back again briefly to place the violin on its stand, the bow hung on a hook behind. When he turned around again, John was watching him.

"You," Sherlock said bluntly. There seemed little point in wasting time. Perhaps John could be of some assistance in discerning the solution to his current problem: John Watson. The frustrating enigma that was John Watson.

John looked temporarily taken aback. "Me?" he repeated, confusion evident in his tone. Sherlock noted his body language become more guarded, tension keeping his shoulders and arms a fraction too still.

"You like me. In a non-platonic sense," Sherlock said, and it wasn't a question. John sat for a moment, stunned. Sherlock watched as he grappled for a decently scathing contradiction, and decided it was simply not worth the effort. John knew by now that lying to the detective opposite him had a habit of simply not working.

The silence stretched between them. John blinked several times, shook his head slightly as though getting water out of his ears, and looked back up at Sherlock, cheeks slightly flushed. "Yes. But it doesn't matter," he said slowly, watching Sherlock carefully. Sherlock found it amusing; the doctor was attempting to assess his reaction, unwilling to cause offence. "Does it matter?"

Sherlock shook his head fractionally. John let out the slightest of sighs; he had expected this conversation, and what was more, expected a far worse outcome. He had wondered if Sherlock would be unable to handle it, whether it would destroy their relationship, whether he would end up needing to move out and leave Sherlock Holmes behind.

After all – John had liked Sherlock for a while, in a gentle, non-intrusive way. First and foremost, they were simply friends., and that was the most important part in John's eyes. John would happily ignore any stronger emotions if it ensured their friendship would continue.

Silence once again. John and Sherlock watched one another, neither speaking. Sherlock's mind was stalling, the conversation lowering his barriers against emotion; they were threatening to spill over, to enter the forefront of his mind, destroy analysis and affect his actions.

The silence grew louder, building to roar in Sherlock's ears. John just sat there, watching the taller man as he suddenly moved, walking briskly to stand in front of John, looking down at him like he was some curiosity Sherlock had discovered, an irregularity in a crime scene that Sherlock couldn't understand.

Sherlock dropped to his knees, resplendent in his blue silk dressing gown, now almost equal height to John in his chair. Sherlock warred for another long minute in his mind, the two poles of his mind – logic and emotion – battling for dominance over the other. John could almost see the battle rage, could read the conflict in Sherlock's electric gaze, a gaze that still fixed entirely on him.

John hesitated for a mere fraction of a second. He didn't need to fight himself; it was almost easy for him to lean forward, and press his lips gently against Sherlock's.

Sherlock's lips remained slack for a single moment. John sensed the moment that emotion won out; Sherlock responded, the connection so shocking, so simple, so completely lovely. Sherlock had kissed, had been kissed in his life – this didn't feel like anything that had preceded it.

This was communication. This was more than desire or lust or passion; it contained flashes of that, yes, but in basic, it was simpler. It was connection. The world constricted to that moment, John's hand tugging gently at Sherlock's black hair, as Sherlock's hands ghosted over John's back, bodies melding together.

John broke it, pulling back slightly, Sherlock resting his forehead against John's. Their pulses had quickened, John's breathing could only be described as ragged and Sherlock… Sherlock was swaying slightly as blood and neurons and impulses raged frantically through his body. He tried to assert some control over what the hell was going on in him, failed catastrophically.

"Sherlock," John said quietly, eyes shut, squeezed almost too tightly closed. "Was that… I mean, I don't…"

"It's ok," Sherlock said simply. He didn't feel the need to elaborate on the statement. It was ok. It wasn't perfect – he didn't understand what he felt, he couldn't start spouting declarations, he wasn't intending to lie. The kiss itself had felt a lot more than ok, but standing there now, Sherlock was scared. This wasn't something he knew how to deal with.

"Sherlock… I think… I think I'm in love with you," John said. He regretted saying it as soon as the words came out. They had kissed. That didn't mean Sherlock… it didn't change anything. If anything, it could make things worse.

Sherlock thought. With every second, John's anxiety ratcheted up another notch. Sherlock wasn't making any move towards breaking their physical contact, however, which John decided had to be a good sign.

Sherlock shut his eyes, breathed deeply. As his chest expanded, it pressed just a touch more into John's, inextricably linked. Sherlock searched valiantly for words, stumbling across those that seemed to make sense, speaking slowly, holding John close while instinct screamed to push away, to run away, retreat and hide.

"I don't know what I feel. I know that I care about you, more so than I have ever done in my past. I desire… I want to be around you. I want… this is… I mean, I don't know about sex or anything like that, I don't _know_, I really… John, am I making any sense?"

John considered that for a moment. "In a way," he said eventually. He didn't understand, not entirely, but this was Sherlock. 'Not understanding' was an occupational hazard.

"I don't know if I love you," Sherlock explained slowly, trying to sift through the tumult of his mind. "But… I know that I trust you, completely. I don't usually trust anybody, John, and I don't… I don't like admitting to people… I… Ok. John, I care about you. And I trust you. And for me, that's actually more important."

John pulled away; the break in their bodies felt astounding cold, and Sherlock's mind screamed as darker emotions – paranoia, loneliness, anxiety – ate into him with a sudden vengeance. "Do you want to be with me?" John asked simply.

"I…" Sherlock stopped. He didn't want to hurt John, he desperately didn't want to hurt him, and lying would be a sure-fire way to cause pain. He took another breath, sensing rather than seeing John's eyes rake over the so familiar face, cheekbones and those extraordinary eyes, hidden beneath a thin veil of skin as Sherlock shut his eyes. "Yes," he said eventually. "Yes, I do."

They both seemed stunned by the admission. The words had slipped away from Sherlock, lashing through the air with surprising force, rebounding on him; he was tumbling off the edge of a precipice, unable to break the fall. The emotions were similar – terror, anticipation, and a secret, subtle thrill of pure adrenaline. All underpinned with something more solid, that nameless sense, that _emotion_ that he couldn't define or explain.

"I don't understand," Sherlock confessed, the words spilling out like something sordid.

John was very quiet for a moment, his gaze caught in Sherlock's and unwilling to break away. "I don't think you need to. I'm not sure this is something that anybody completely understands. You just… you just go with it."

"I'm not a 'go with it' kind of person," Sherlock fretted, his brow creasing, making him look remarkably young for a moment. John laughed lightly, thumb brushing over the creases in a calm, intimate gesture. He kissed Sherlock again, a mere brush of lips, gentle, undemanding.

"We can work it out?" John suggested lightly. He wasn't going to pretend for a moment that this would be simple, or easy. That would be patronising, and ultimately ridiculous, and Sherlock appreciated immensely that John didn't try to placate him with meaningless platitudes. "I'm not suggesting we start running around the street waving rainbow flags, you know. It doesn't have to be a big thing. It doesn't have to be anything."

"But I want it to be," Sherlock said instantly, blushing slightly as the logical half of his brain registered the words that he had spoken aloud. John didn't seem to mind.

"That's good then," he said simply. He wrapped his arms around Sherlock, and pulled him close again, their heads entwined, John's breath warm against Sherlock's neck. John closed his eyes, allowed himself a moment to indulge in the moment, the moment he had scarcely believed could ever truly happen.

Sherlock's mind danced, sang, imploded in on itself. He had no idea what was going on. He disliked not knowing; it was fundamentally upsetting, defied his usual world order and sent things spinning in the wrong direction. John was literally tipping everything he knew out of kilter, disrupting any tentative stability he told himself he had and throwing everything to the wind.

He was terrified. He was falling fast, faster than he believed possible. He had no idea what was at the bottom, what was waiting for him. He had no idea if he would survive. He had no idea if there even _was_ a bottom. He was truly terrified, scared beyond all reason or sense. All he knew was that he was falling, again, and had no way to stop it.

Only this time – just this time – he didn't have to be alone.


End file.
